


Static State

by erinthesails



Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Genre: Gen, M/M, Underage Substance Use, depictions of childhood emotional abuse, i don't imagine that either of them had awesome childhoods, some blood and violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 15:59:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18854326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erinthesails/pseuds/erinthesails
Summary: "Those two do seem awful keen on each other..."A brief study in the psychology of Worth and Conrad.





	Static State

Conrad doesn’t know what it is at first, but something just settles in his bones when he’s around Doc Worth. It all clicks into place, reluctant but certain, like fingers into dry sockets.

Something seethes in him, relentless and inevitable. Something he hadn’t even known he had, but it must have been lying dormant in his bloodstream all along, waiting for the last drop to bleed out before it could release. An ancient bacterium hiding in the icy scores of a slow-moving glacier, finally uncovered.

Something infectious.

Something almost like…carelessness.

*   *   *

It’s a thrill, really, when Conrad first shows up at his door. A gift. An absolute goddamn motherfuckin’ pleasure.

It boils under his skin, the promise of bruises, black-blue and bleeding, of things clicked out of place in all the right ways. Conrad is all buttons—reaction, reaction, reaction, every single fuckin’ time. And Worth is the circuit board, every wire singing with anticipation.

It isn’t often he meets someone who never fails to dignify him with a fight.

*   *   *

Twenty-seven years, nine months, and seventeen days of living, and if there was one thing Conrad had learned, it was how to disappear. It was easy, really, when you had the instinct for it.

A stitch here, a pin there, and his lips practically embroidered themselves into a strained, polite smile the eyes could skid right over. He held himself just so, hemmed in every word with careful clippers, cut his teeth on the whole notion of personhood by learning to blend into the wallpaper. He was an excuse wrapped in an apology, inhaling fear and exhaling resentment, and caring, all the time, so very much, was more natural than the air in his lungs.

But he was twenty-seven years, nine months, seventeen days old and an hour dead now. He could hold his breath for fucking days, and there was a sickly-sweet rush, he discovered, that came with not giving a fuck. And for once in his whole, stupid, useless life, he just wasn’t able to summon one up to give.

*   *   *

Worth tracks his years like he tracks his cigarettes. There’s a general sense of how many and when and where, but the specifics don’t matter much ‘til they’re running out.

What’s another day but another fag stubbed out on the buffed wood of a café table? A kid’s ball rolling past his feet and kicked further down the street? A wallet stuffed with petty cash and family photos left in the seat of a shopping cart, slipped into his pocket?

Give and take and give and take. He was someone who demanded a reaction. Why wouldn’t you, he figured, if you could get one?

What was life but a series of buttons that you just hadn’t figured out how to push yet?

*   *   *

“Back fer more, Conniekins?”

“I’m just here for Hanna, as always, Worth. We both know I wouldn’t come within a mile of your disgusting office if I had half a choice in the matter.”

“Aw, sweetcheeks, ya can’t hide nothin’ from me. It ain’t even been a week yet, I know ya been itchin’ fer a fix’a _this.”_

“Excellent, disgusting as ever, thank you so much for the mental image. It really is a wonder I don’t come here more often.”

“Awww, no need ta play coy, peaches. I’m the highlight’a yer—”

“One more word and I’ll tear you into so many pieces it’s gonna be like fucking Operation putting them back together again. I’m sure it’s more medical training than you’ve had in your whole sorry career anyway.”

“Oooh, got some fight in ya tonight, princess! Gets me all tingly when yer like this.”

“Okay, okay, come on guys! Give him a break Worth, and Con-man, you’ve got that look in your eye again like you’re gonna deck someone and we really really don’t have time for that right now, so if you could just hang onto whatever _this_ is until later, that would be great!”

“Sounds peachy keen ta me, ‘s long as the princess here kin keep his hands to himself.”

“You should be so lucky.”

*   *   *

Conrad was eleven.

He was eleven and nervous and spent evert two out of three nights making himself small on velour couches of women dressed like his mother, who asked him questions like “Where does all this anger come from, Conrad?” and “Do you ever worry that your father left because of you?”

The other nights were spent on the velour couch of his own living room, those same questions coming venom-soaked from his mother’s mouth, spun up in a cocoon of shawls and sheer stockings and dewdropped with glittering costume jewelry. He suspected, at some point, that the answer was less important than the questions held like spider eggs in his hands.

Conrad was eleven and sniffing and pretending not to care about balloons outside and a cake for him as his mother talked into the phone about fits and nervous seizures. He was curled up by the window, nose flattened against the glass that overlooked a yard bustling with people he barely knew, but who must have been here for him anyway.

“Oh please, don’t be difficult. You’re not well, you’d only have another fit and embarrass yourself. Is that what you want, to make me look like a bad mother who can’t care for her son? Now pull yourself together, stop that whining.”

Conrad was thirteen and sprawled out on the floor surrounded by charcoals and thick sheaves of paper that wobbled when he spun them around his room. The print of his hand shone bright and clean through the silver dust on his pinky finger.

“I hope you don’t have any delusions about keeping that up next year. You’re not going to have any time for scribbling with your course schedule. I’m throwing these away in the morning, you have more than enough.”

Conrad was fifteen and red faced and fuming, something broken on the tile next to him and he knew he’d be swallowed by molten remorse for it by the morning, by the end of the hour even, but now he’s all floes of hate and treacherous tectonics that make his fingers itch to shatter whatever they can.

“You could have been such a lovely boy,” long lacquered nails sighed down his cheeks. “That anger, so ugly. It’s a shame you inherited your father’s temperament.”

Conrad was eighteen and calling from the darkness of an empty dorm room.

“No. Yep. Mhm, MIT has been wonderful. Computer science, yes, the whole department. Lots of friends. Mhm. Yes, of course.”

Desk lamp illuminated fine lines and scrolling graphite curves, pencil filling in dark shadows and textbooks open to paintings he wished he’d seen in London before running half a world away. His hair sweat-stuck to his forehead in the open-mouth Florida heat.

“No, what makes you ask that?”

*   *   *

Worth was eleven.

He was eleven and scrappy and he was called Luce back then but not by anyone who gave half a shit about him. He was “the Worth kid” to anyone who knew of his family, “kid” to anyone who didn’t, and just plain “Worth” to the greasy kid down the street who indulged him in a good fight more often than anyone else in this whole sorry neighborhood, hell, this whole sorry country, and he guessed that made them friends, didn’t it? Or something like that.

Worth was eleven and his cheek was busted open and polished shoes scuffed mud over plush carpeting.

“Got inna fight at school today.”

“Mhm.”

“Asshole jumped me after lunch.”

“I’m busy, Luce.”

“He said I started it. I gotta stay after school cleaning tables all week, so I can’t watch Liv anymore.”

“God dammit, do you pull this shit just to piss me off?”

Worth was thirteen and he was tequila tipsy in the middle of the day, stumbling out the front door to he wasn’t really sure where, but he always found some way to entertain himself.

“’M goin’ out.”

“Be back before dark and don’t do anything stupid.”

“Maybe I’ll get hit by a car. Or rob a liquor store.”

“What was that?”

“Nothin’.”

Worth was fifteen and getting bitched out over a pack of cigarettes left in jeans pocket that had tumbled out into the laundry, soaking everything through with the sweat smell of tobacco. Pupils blasted wide like torpedo tears in a ship hull, a little more than tequila tipsy this time, but so was the woman bearing down on him in the gleaming marble kitchen, snarling like a jungle cat.

“Quit grinning like a fucking idiot and answer me.”

“Would if I had anythin’ ta say.”

“Oh piss off, Luce. You’re an ungrateful little shit, you know that?”

Worth was eighteen and had on a backpack and jeans and his parents were waiting on the lawn behind the high school three streets over, and he had no intention of meeting them there. The black pants and gown the housekeeper had pressed the night before were pinned up in the rose bushes out back. He pinched a cigarette between his teeth and held a phone up to his ear.

“C’mon, Mont. Ya ready ta go or what?”

“It’s graduation day Luce, can’t you just wait for the damn ceremony to be over?”

“Don’t pussy out on me, now.”

“You wanna skip it to piss off your parents, fine, but I’m the only one in my whole stupid family to graduate high school, so I kinda have to be there. I’ll call you in two hours, okay? Sorry.”

*   *   *

That first night is like an echo of all nights after. Stretching out, kaleidoscopic, something new and familiar every turn.

“Shut UP!” someone was yelling and at first Conrad didn’t know who it was. “I’ve HAD it! I don’t have to take this shit from you!”

Conrad was fifteen again, belching up rage, only the guilt he’s getting ready to swallow never seems to come.

On the floor, jaw popping, lip splitting, for some reason, in a life full of fights and burst blood vessels, Worth couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow this fight was the first.

“Mr. Achenleck, wait!”

A rush of endorphins and not-endorphins and the taste of blood and the smell of death in the shape of the nervous kid between them.

“Please, please, pleeeeeeease, _don’t eat him.”_

A grin, a sigh, and for a second something tasted like life on both their tongues.

*   *   *

Conrad was twenty-seven years, nine months, and seventeen days old still, plus a few more months dead on top of that, and he had a dirty fur collar in his fist.

Doc Worth had lost track of how old he was, but it was a damn sight older than that, he was sure, and the torn fibers of a prissy red sweater were packed under his nails and his elbows were oozing, bandages split open where he’d fallen hard on the concrete office floor.

How many nights had it been now? This was just one glittering lens in the kaleidoscope, all blood and release and response, response, response. Something that kept on turning over and over, fresh every time, alive every time, familiar every time.

“Th’ fuck’re ya grinnin’ at me fer, ya goddamn fairy?”

“I could ask you the same thing, you flea-bitten creep. You look like a fucking jack-o-lantern.”

Uneven rows of teeth flicked in and out of view as a furred sleeve caught a line of blood leaking like a broken pipe. Every pin had been pulled from the pattern around Conrad’s lips, but they were twisting up anyway like a key in a loose bolt of silk.

Conrad licked his teeth and tasted copper and Worth felt the plump kiss of a bruise blooming at the edge of his lip. Teeth glinted in dim fluorescents and chemicals released from veins like fungus spores and Conrad aimed another kick at skinny ribs, spindly fingers catching the hem of a sweater as one man went down, pulling the other after.


End file.
